by Harper Lin
The south side of the green was taken up by a long row of shops, all in cute little Colonial-style buildings. Some of the buildings were actually old, but most were modern imitations, just like the majority of the houses in Cheerville. The residents all wanted to pretend they lived in George Washington’s day, although they kept their cell phones and flat-screen TVs, of course. There’s even a recreation of a Revolutionary War battle every year with Redcoats and Minutemen and a big booming cannon. That actually got Martin away from his Xbox for a couple of hours.
The businesses were what you’d expect for a chocolate-box commuter and tourist town. A string of antique shops face the village green, plus a couple of restaurants, gourmet cheese and wine shops, a café, a pet shop, and a few fashion boutiques. The more utilitarian businesses such as the supermarket, gas station, and a bar with a bit of a bad reputation, were all tucked out of sight behind the commuter train station on the other side of town.
We stopped at downtown Cheerville’s one light, which had just turned red in our honor. Pearl peered out the window at the graveyard.
“You think they’ll plant him in there?” she asked.
“I don’t think anyone has been buried there for more than a hundred years.”
“So where will he go? Potter’s Field?”
“I’m sure Gretchen has a nice plot somewhere.”
“She’ll probably just have him burned up and toss the ashes somewhere and good riddance.”
“Pearl!” I shouted, scandalized. Gretchen was one of my main murder suspects, but that was no excuse for rudeness.
“Oh, she won’t miss him at all. She’ll be living it up in the Bahamas in no time.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked, intrigued. Pearl could be pushy and impatient and downright rude, but she’d lived long enough to have a clear view of people’s character.
“You know how she’s always pining to go off to some tropical paradise. Just look at that art she has on her walls! And she’s roped Pauline into helping her set up an aquarium. Like Pauline knows a barracuda from a hole in the ground! I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the day after Lucien is planted in the ground or his ashes are blowing in the wind like in that hippy song, she’ll be on a flight to some island somewhere.”
As the light changed and we pulled away from Cheerville town center and into a residential neighborhood, I considered that. Gretchen did always talk about how she wanted to travel, and she did fantasize about unspoiled beaches and tropical sunsets. Even the choice of this month’s reading material, Endless Beach, was her idea of a mental getaway.
Her husband, Lucien, on the other hand, had been perfectly content to putter around Cheerville helping little old ladies who swooned at the mere sight of him. Being stuck with a husband who garnered that much attention while not being able to live one’s dreams must have rankled. But was that motive enough for murder?
I found it hard to believe. Gretchen and Lucien seemed to get along just fine. I’d never heard her complain about him. In fact, I’d never heard her complain about all the ladies eyeing her husband. Pauline had fallen for Lucien, acting like a schoolgirl with a crush and being so foolish as to tell him. Lucien had been nice about it, told her he wasn’t interested, and everyone managed to stay friends.
If Gretchen was so enraged as to actually kill her husband, would she be setting up an aquarium with one of his suitors?
Truth be told, none of the members of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society seemed like poisoners to me, and yet one of them had to be.
“Throat lozenge?” Pearl asked, offering me a little box of candied medicine.
“Um, no, thank you,” I replied, tensing.
Even Pearl could be a murderer.
We pulled up at Gretchen’s house to see her garage door open. Gretchen was just visible behind the family car, putting a garbage bag into the big plastic container. She jumped a little as my tires crunched on the gravel driveway.
I pulled in behind her car, and she gave a little wave.
Two things struck me as odd—her throwing away trash at this hour and her jumping as we came up.
First, trash collection wasn’t until just before dawn the next day, so there was no need to throw the garbage out now, especially since the bag didn’t appear full. Second, why had she jumped at our sudden appearance?
Devil’s advocate (or perhaps poisoner’s advocate): Perhaps the trash contained something stinky she didn’t want to keep in the house. Perhaps she was startled because of a sudden noise on her driveway when she wasn’t expecting visitors.
A little more investigation would see what was right and what wasn’t.
“Hello, Barbara,” Gretchen said as I got out of the car. Her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in black. It was obvious she hadn’t gotten any sleep. Grief or guilt? Hard to say. I remember not getting any sleep the first time I ever killed someone, and that had been a drug smuggler firing his AK-47 at me. Poisoning your husband of forty years would likely have a similar effect.
Of course, losing your husband without having murdered him would make you lose a lot of sleep, too. I knew all about that. After James passed, I didn’t get a good night’s sleep for a long, long time.
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, tears welled up in my eyes.
I hurried over to embrace Gretchen. I didn’t know if I was comforting a murderer or not, but I knew I was comforting myself. After a long hug, I released her.
“How are you holding up, Gretchen?” I asked, wiping my cheeks.
Her cheeks were wet too.
“Well, he’s with the good Lord now.”
“Sorry for coming over unannounced. Pearl led me to believe she’d spoken with you.”
“That’s all right.”
“We’re all so terribly sorry about Lucien. He was a good man.”
I studied Gretchen’s face for her reaction to this statement but saw nothing but grief.
“I just don’t know why it was so sudden,” she replied. “He was so healthy. I know one shouldn’t count the years at our age, but I thought we’d have fifteen, twenty more. I don’t know how this could happen.”
I did, or at least I had an inkling.
“Any word from the medical examiner?”
Gretchen shook her head.
“Charles is taking care of all that. He’s been a rock. I suppose we’ll hear later today.”
Her words had a distant, stunned quality to them. It made me lean more toward “innocent woman in mourning” than “first-time poisoner shocked at her own ability to kill.” I checked that line of thought. I needed to be objective.
“Is anyone going to help me out of the car?” Pearl squawked. She was trying to get out of the car herself, gripping the doorframe with her weak hands and tugging against the increasingly strong force of Earth’s gravity. I’d been feeling it more in recent years myself. I hurried over. Well, I hurried over as much as Earth’s ever-increasing gravity allowed. I used to be light on my feet. Now, I was simply grateful to stay on my feet.
I helped Pearl up, and together the three of us went through the garage to the open door that I knew led to the laundry room and, beyond it, the kitchen. I glanced at the garbage bin as I passed. I would need to take a look in there.
As we went through the kitchen, all three of us stared for a moment at the spot next to the sink where Lucien had fallen dead. There was nothing to show that murder had struck there. It was just a simple linoleum floor, freshly mopped.
We moved into the living room. Gretchen sank into the couch with an exhausted air. I helped ease Pearl into her usual armchair. I took the same chair I had sat in the day before in order to get myself into the feel of that situation. In one of the other chairs or on that couch, a murderer had sat through all of yesterday’s meeting, waiting for Lucien to die. Less than twenty-four hours ago, Lucien had been alive and making worn-out old hearts beat a little faster, their ragged pulses get a little stronger. Now he was lying in the county morgue.
/> There was an awkward silence, as there always was in these situations. I had known plenty of death in the field and plenty of death as friends and family aged, but I had never yet figured out what to say. Because there really wasn’t anything to say.
The silence did give me time to think, though.
The poison had most likely been administered in the refreshments, either the lemon cake or the lemonade. I thought back to how they had been served, imagining the room as it had been the afternoon before. I had deliberately taken the same seat as the previous day to help with that.
Gretchen had prepared both the cake and the lemonade. She was the star chef of the family. I couldn’t recall Lucien ever cooking anything. Gretchen had come in and served the lemonade first, pouring it into each glass from a large pitcher. Obviously, the poison hadn’t been in the pitcher, but a few drops could have been in the bottom of one of the glasses. They were bright-green tumblers that would have hid a few drops from view. Plus, many poisons were clear liquids, and thus, even if someone noticed, they would assume it to be water from when Gretchen had washed them. She could have given the poisoned cup to Lucien.
But wait, that wasn’t correct. Thinking back, I clearly remembered that she had poured all the glasses and immediately gone back to fetch the cake. Everyone had taken their own glasses. Of course, they were set on a tray and everyone more or less took the one closest to them, but that was a risky proposition. If the poison went to the wrong person, she would have run the risk for nothing and killed a friend. Plus, she wouldn’t be able to poison Lucien later without causing a great deal of suspicion.
So it had to have been in the cake. I focused, trying to summon up Gretchen’s movements after returning with the cake. I remembered cringing at the quote she’d written on it with icing: Like the sand on the beach, our love is renewed with every crashing wave. Everyone had made the usual appreciative noises about the cake, I as much as the rest of them. Gretchen’s cake was to die for.
Ahem.
So had she handed out the pieces, or had she set them on the table and let people take them? I really couldn’t remember. I think I glanced back at my book and then started talking with Pauline. Or was it Pearl?
I thought for a while longer. Nope, it was gone. I had no idea how each person had ended up with their particular slice of cake.
It’s incredible what small details can become crucially important later. I had been trained to understand this, had kept it at the forefront of my thoughts over many long years in tight situations. I can’t tell you the number of times a sharp memory and an eye for detail had saved James and me.
But at seventy years of age, eating lemon cake in a gray-haired reading club in a dull town, I had forgotten that important lesson.
“Would you like something to eat? Tea and biscuits, perhaps?” Gretchen asked.
My heart turned to ice. Was she going to poison us?
“I’m fine, thanks,” I was quick to respond. “I just had breakfast.”
“That would be lovely. I’m starved,” Pearl said.
I stared at Pearl in horror. What could I say to stop this?
Then reason and logic kicked in. If Gretchen was the murderer, she wouldn’t poison us. That would cause too much suspicion, and, presumably, she had no motive. I couldn’t even be sure she was the culprit.
Even so, I still couldn’t help a sense of panic as Gretchen got up and moved into the kitchen.
“Let me help you,” I offered, rising from my chair.
“No need,” Gretchen said.
“I don’t mind,” I replied as I followed her. I wanted to see how she would react.
“Oh, if you must,” Gretchen said. “I just feel I need to keep busy.”
I followed her into the kitchen. She opened up a cabinet to get some tea bags and a tin of biscuits. I did a quick survey of the cupboard’s contents before she closed it. Nope, no big bottle with a skull and crossbones on it saying “Deadly Poison: Guaranteed to off your hubby or your money back!”
This case wasn’t making it easy for me.
I helped her brew the tea and set out cookies, feeling like I was conspiring with her to murder Pearl. Once we were done, we returned to find Pearl still ensconced in her armchair as usual.
Gretchen offered her some cookies, and the reading club’s oldest member took a couple and started munching away with a contented air.
“You sure you don’t want anything?” Gretchen asked.
“No, I’m fine, thank you,” I said, trying to keep any traces of fear out of my voice as I gave a sidelong glance at Pearl. She seemed as healthy as ever, which wasn’t saying much. She hadn’t keeled over, anyway.
I turned back to Gretchen. “So, what happened? Did Lucien have heart trouble?”
Gretchen gave a sad little shrug. “I don’t know. I didn’t think so. He had regular checkups, and the doctor said he was fine.”
“It’s his age,” Pearl barked, a few crumbs sticking to her wrinkled lips. “Any of us can drop dead at any moment.”
Gretchen went pale. I shot Pearl a nasty look that she didn’t notice. At her age, people were in their own little worlds, and you either had to accept that or not spend time with them.
“May I use the restroom?” I asked, as much out of embarrassment as an excuse for snooping.
“Of course,” Gretchen replied without hesitation.
I headed down the hall. The bathroom was at the far end, past the master bedroom and a spare room that doubled as a study. I glanced into both. The master bedroom looked the same as I remembered. The spare room now had a large aquarium against one wall. It wasn’t filled with water yet, but otherwise, it appeared ready. Colored rocks filled the bottom couple of inches, along with a model of a sunken pirate ship. A pump was hitched to one of the glass walls. A few plastic containers stood on a small table next to it.
Glancing down the hall back toward the living room to make sure no one was looking, I entered the room and made a beeline for those containers. One was fish food, and the other two were for cleaning the tank. I put on my reading glasses and read the warning labels. While the labels said they should be kept out of reach of children, a quick survey of the contents yielded nothing that could have killed Lucien so quickly, if at all. Plus both were nearly full, obviously having been used only once to clean the new tank in preparation for it being filled with water.
Even if Lucien or someone else had put the small missing amounts of cleaner into his stomach instead of the tank, he would have only had a bad tummy ache. These aquarium supplies were not the murder weapons.
I set the containers back exactly as I had found them and continued to the bathroom. Closing and locking the door behind me, I did some more snooping.
Their medicine cabinet was almost devoid of medicine. Besides some aspirin and cough syrup, there was only a small eyedropper of glaucoma medication. The prescription label was made out to Gretchen Rogers. I hadn’t known she suffered from glaucoma. A quick read of the warning label and contents showed that this could be chugged by the pint and not cause death.
I rummaged through the other cabinets and found nothing. Of course, there were household cleaning supplies that could kill, but they had an immediate corrosive effect on the mouth and throat. Lucien couldn’t have sat through an entire meeting judging fictional characters for their lack of moral fiber if he had ingested some of that stuff.
Putting my hands on my hips, I gave the bathroom a frown. I was stumped.
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, even though I didn’t need to. Details like this were important in a cover story.
I returned to the living room just as Pearl proclaimed, “Well, at least you can take that trip to the Bahamas now.”
Gretchen’s eyes went wide, and she grew even paler than she had been when I’d retreated from the room. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that her gaze briefly flicked to a photo of a beach of pure-white sand and turquoise water that hung above the mantelpiece.
Just then, my phone rang. The screen told me it was my son, Frederick. My heart did a little flip-flop. I had my chance to look in Gretchen’s garbage.
I answered it.
“Hello, Mom?” my son’s voice came over the line. Wait, phones didn’t work on lines anymore. Funny how language takes so long to catch up with reality.
“Hello?” I said, and then louder, “Hello?”
“Yes, Mom, it’s me.”
“Hold on, the signal isn’t very good on this darn thing. Let me go outside.”
“But Mom, I can hear you just—”
“What? Just one second.”
I made an apologetic shrug. Gretchen gave me a tired nod, and I walked out the front door, which was closer than the side door, so I had to use it so as to not arouse suspicion.
I’d already noticed that the blinds were down. She wouldn’t see me as I crossed her front lawn.
As fast as my legs could carry me, which wasn’t very fast at all, I headed for the garage.
“Hello, Mom? Can you hear me better now?”
“Yes, just fine,” I replied as I entered the garage.
“I have a client who wants to look at a house this evening at six. Could you watch Martin for an hour or so?”
I paused. Time was ticking on my investigation. However, I couldn’t think of a way to say no.
“All right. It will be just an hour or two, right? Things are still topsy turvy with Gretchen and everyone.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But you know how Martin is. I can’t leave him alone.”
True enough. Thieves could come in and steal everything and set the house on fire, and as long as they didn’t touch the TV or Xbox, the child wouldn’t even notice.
“I’ll be there at six. Bye,” I said, hanging up.
